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Are You Centered?
To be centered is considered desirable. But if there is no person inside your head, if the ego’s sense of I, me, mine is illusory, where’s the center? Paradoxically, the center is everywhere. It is the open space that has no boundaries.
Experience isn’t a place; it’s a focus of attention. You can live there, at the still point around which everything revolves. To be off center is to lose focus, to look away from experience or block it out.
To be centered is like saying “I want to find my home in creation.” You relax into the rhythm of your own life, which sets the stage for meeting yourself at a deeper level. You can’t summon the silent witness, but you can place yourself close to it by refusing to get lost in your own creation.
When I find myself being overshadowed by anything, I can fall back on a few simple steps: I say to myself, “This situation may be shaking me, but I am more than any situation.” I take a deep breath and focus my attention on whatever my body is feeling. I step back and see myself as another person would see me (preferably the person whom I am resisting or reacting to.) I realize that my emotions are not reliable guides to what is permanent and real. They are momentary reactions, and most likely they are born of habit. If I am about to burst out with uncontrollable reactions, I walk away.
As you can see, I don’t try to feel better, to be more positive, to come from love, or to change the state I’m in. If you can observe the mechanism at work without getting wrapped up in it, you will find that you possess a second perspective, one that is always calm, alert, detached, tuned in but not overshadowed. That second place is your center. It isn’t a place at all but a close encounter with the silent witness.
Adapted from The Book of Secrets, by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 2004).
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good advice....takes practice...always learning. My ego is so very strong that it feels comfortably uncomfortable. If I let it go, I find so much more calm, even if I have not "won".
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Great Writings Thank You Deepak............*)/
~ God Bless Our Troops~
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Thak you for new ideas!
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A beautiful piece of inspiring writing.Thank you
sarah
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For me being centered is being totally focused in this moment. I find that exactly as you,Deepak, have said that second attention always brings me home to the fertile point of this moment. All the things that I do that demand total concentration in the moment, that will not go well if my attention strays or are just too glorious to look away from are activities that I find ultimately very refreshing and that is the gift of the moment. When I am caught in subjective focus it's too easy to stray down the many alley ways of the mind , through fantasy. Immediately upon bringing myself home to the moment all potential displays itself and I have ample time to contemplate and choose direction. In a strange way it's like that timeless moment when you trip and time seems to stretch forever to let you move just this and that to keep from utter disaster. Like the cartoon when the character has walked off the cliff and there is that moment when it is hanging there contemplating what's happening before taking the plunge. Strange to thing that accidents when you feel your stomach lurch and adrenalin kick in are centering but I suppose that that's a survival mechanism, coming home to the moment, centering, allowing the best outcome.
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Thank-you Deepak,
In other words, just come from your true self in any or all moments of Life. Instead of from who we think we are. Knowing that all moments are an opportunity for growth, if allowed.
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